341 – Profitable Business Consulting With John Logar – Preview

An active member of the SuperFastBusiness community, John Logar is also a successful local business consultant. In this talk from the SuperFastBusiness 9 live event, he shares real-life pointers that you can immediately implement to put more money into your business bank account.

01:16 – A quick warm-up
02:50 – The opportunities in selling online to offline
03:49 – Make the best money thru middleman marketing
05:24 – What does the average consultant make?
06:19 – The real magic figure that consultants should aim for
06:45 – How is your cash flow?
07:33 – Your focus becomes what’s real to you
08:40 – You need a plan
09:35 – More customers, more revenue, more often
09:49 – The most profitable opportunity for consultants

James: All right, so next up I’ve got to call John Logar. He’s getting there with the surfing. Was that your first time? First time ever?

OK, so what we’re going to do is, firstly, John is in the community, very active. He’s like a travelling salesman, I suppose. He goes from local meet-up to local meet-up, he’s got a little local business consulting gig running. I think he’s kind of a success story from one of the previous events.

He really implements stuff. And so he’s earned this spot. So John, come up and share 20 minutes with us of your best stuff.

John: Thanks. Appreciate it, thank you. What I’d like you to do is, I’m going to be very quick today, but I want to share some things that you can actually take away and apply in your businesses when you leave this conference. OK? And the idea is to put money in your bank account. Good idea? All right, good.

So, I’m going to talk about the business of selling offline to online, or online to offline. I’m going to talk about some strategies that really work, where the money is, in this business, and I’m going to talk about an actual campaign you can run, apply straight away, and profit from. Great? Cool.

A Bit of Perspective
The business of selling online to offline. I just want to just give you perspective on this, because how many people in this room are actually selling services to offline businesses, marketing services? About half. How many are selling a product online? About half again. OK. So both of you are going to benefit from this presentation.

But the services to businesses offline, we haven’t even scratched the surface of the opportunity and the potential of the revenue that you can generate as a business model selling Internet marketing services out to the offline world. OK? Ninety-eight percent of websites have not been touched for more than five years.

They don’t have opt-ins. They don’t have automation. They’re not using tools. They’re not actually campaigning to anybody. They’re not actually offering anything to anybody.

So can you imagine the potential and the opportunities out there? What I’m going to share with you is how you can get into people very easily, to help them get on board with online.

Middle Man Marketing
So first of all, the middle man marketing business. This is the most profitable model in the consulting world. What middle man marketing means is I’m an online consultant, I need to run a direct response campaign online for my client, I hire somebody like Walter, with exceptional copywriting skills to develop a strategy and a campaign.

I invest some money or bring in somebody who has automation services, for example, Ontraport, OK? I won’t mention the other famous guys, they didn’t bother coming, so screw them. But understand that you can automate that process, and then what I’ll do is I’ll actually hire somebody to implement that strategy, to implement that process. And then I’ll put my margin, which is generally three times the price.

Whatever the cost is, times three times, is what I’ll put on it. That’s what I work with. OK? Not double the price. Double the price is only a 50% increase on cost. Triple the price is 100% increase on cost.

And then I’ll run the campaign. And I’ve got enough money in the resources that I invest for the client that they’re investing in my services to make sure that I get the best possible result for the client. So as a middle man marketer, I will not build a website for you. I’ll hire somebody to do that for me.

I’ll use, I mean James has ATLWeb services, SEOPartner for content and SEO work, Pay-Per-Click services like Mike Rhodes, we’ve got Swift Digital in the room. I will not do any of the work. The best money that I can make is to sell more of what I do, and that’s the result to the client.

So middle man marketing business is very, very profitable. The average consultant in the world today, in our game, selling online services, makes about 55 to 75K gross profit. That’s what they make, on average.

I spent the last three months talking to digital agencies and independent contractors around the world, and asking them “How are things going?” “What are you doing?” “What’s happening out there?”

Average gross profit. Average gross revenue. 75K. What people want, is they want, they think they want, is 120K a year. OK? That’s the magic figure, 10 grand a month. It’s great, I can build a lifestyle business for that.

The challenge with 120 grand a year, is they’re not taking consideration of costs, time, effort, energy, and the resources they need to run their business. So that 120K turns into 75K in your pocket. Or 50K in your pocket. Or if you hit the 55K mark, it turns into 35K in your pocket. OK?

So where you want to head is the real number of 240,000. Two hundred forty thousand dollars in revenue for an independent consultant out in the market is roughly five clients paying you three to six grand a month. Gives you that revenue, on retainer.

That’s not a lot of clients, yeah? Five clients, OK? A lot of people think, yeah, let’s go and get hundreds of clients. But you don’t need a lot to make a lot in this business in terms of profitability.

Focusing on Cash Flow
So here’s the thing. You’re in the business, and cash flow is king. The majority of people that I talk to and I ask, “How’s the cash flow going? Is it looking great?” What do you think the answer is? No, it’s not happening for them.

The reason why it’s not happening for them is they don’t focus on the cash flow. They’re focusing on getting things right, getting things packaged right, putting all the steps into place, getting ready. They’ll occasionally go out there, look for potential clients, think about who I can do business with.

I’m going to show you 10,000 places you can find great clients that will spend tens of thousands of dollars in marketing services. It’s a really hard site to find. It’s called Google. Right? Very difficult, very plain-looking. But it has magic in it, and I’ll demonstrate where the magic is.

So, cash flow is king. The first thing I do in the morning when I get up, I check my cash flow. The next question I ask is, “What am I doing today to contribute to the growth of that cash flow?” And that’s where my activity and exercise goes.

If I’m not doing that, guess what doesn’t happen? No cash flow. What you focus on most becomes real to you, in your business.

All right, so, stop playing with yourself. OK? You need to get into the game. The only way you’re going to generate revenue is to communicate with your potential clients. Or people who are in business. Or looking for people who have the potential to introduce their friends to you.

Strategic alliances in the offline consulting game, online consulting game, is gold. I have a client of mine that I work with, has an accountant as a strategic alliance, and that accountant refers all his clients for online marketing to that person. Every client. They don’t have to do any prospecting. They’ve got three strategic alliances they work with.

They don’t do any prospecting for clients. They just sell their services to help advance and generate business online. So stop playing with yourself. Get out there and have some conversations.

Now, this is a general patent. Statement here: Without a plan, you’re just a tourist. OK? Most businesses, even most small businesses, don’t have a plan. The plan you’re looking at is an eight-week plan. It’s designed to focus on generating $150,000 to $250,000 worth of revenue, in eight weeks.

It has a strategy of how we’re going to get into the market, on the left hand side. And on the right hand side is the actual sales process of getting into that market. It targets the client. This area is the IT knowledge management space.

The sales cycle is actually between four to eight weeks to convert the client, and then I have an execution in that process. But you’ll notice it’s on a very expensive piece of electronic equipment. Just sits on my desk, and that’s where the attention and the focus is.

As soon as you get clear about what you want, who you’re going to do it for and how you’re going to go about doing it, the faster you’re going to get out there and do it. It’s really key.

Profiting Off The Back End
So, More Customers, More Revenue, More Often. We’re all about, a lot of us here, talking about generating in the offline, in the consulting world, generating more customers for our clients, yup? There’s a lot of money expended and energy in generating more customers.

The funny thing is, the greatest opportunity that you have as a consultant is to talk about what happens in the More Often column. The back end. The people you’re going to talk to already have customers. But they don’t monetize, or nurture, or generate a connection with, or encourage, or reoffer. They just don’t do it.

They’re too busy spending all their money upfront, in the front end. Now in the back end, in the More Often column, you’ve got much greater profit-building opportunity. And the other thing is, you can get the greatest results faster than the back end.

Anybody do direct response marketing to people’s back ends? In the room? There’s got to be somebody here, yeah. Work really well with you, Josh? Yeah, awesome.

I’ll give you a classic example of how the back end works well. I was sitting down with a solar company that was in the commodity of selling solar to homes in Australia, and they were constantly looking for the new customer. But they also installed solar hot water systems as well.

So what I said was, “How many people bought the solar hot water systems off you?” They said, “We’ve got hundreds and hundreds of people who have done that.” And I said, “So you’ve got a database of them?” They said, “Well, we’ve kind of got them in our point of sale system.”

“Can we extract that data and offer them home solar in that process? Can we get a good deal and a good package together?” “Absolutely.” “So why don’t we give it a try?” So we extract the data, throw it in an autoresponder system, developed a four-prong campaign that I’ll share with you at the end of this presentation, and ran it.

Now the database was only 800 people. The conversion rate was 7%. The revenue return was $400,000 on existing customers. Now at the front end, they were doing 250 a month. On the back end, they nearly more than doubled their business.

A lot of people leave this part of their business alone, because they’re too busy, focused on the front end, trying to get a deal. This is an excellent area of opportunity. The More Often area.